Look at Ray Ray Run

What? He's a gold glove elite caliber second baseman. Why would you move that around? Why would you sign a 2nd baseman and a CF'er if your rebuild involves Robert and Madrigal.

How can someone be a LOOGY in baseball going forward when you cannot face one batter anymore?

Say what? Who in their right mind would non-tender Carlos Rodon?

I think the Angels end up signing Cole, as well.

The Astros didn't reinvent the wheel with Cole. They eliminated his sinker and told him to elevate his fastball in the zone. They increased his spin rate on the slider too but that's not going to stop when he leaves.

Yes, they do individualize their pitching reports but Cole has learned what he needs to learn. Similarly to how a company may pay to teach you a new code language, and that's very valuable to your career but you dont need to stay with that company to retain the information. Cole has attacked hitters the same way since he got to Houston. Sometimes I think we give too much credit to analytics and not enough credit to the players skill set. Houston taught gerrit Cole how to maximize his skill set - that should be something he can take with him everywhere. Just my opinion.

Astros owner hinted that the only way they'd keep Cole is if they won the World Series and got that WS revenue. Who knows how true that is.

This is working off some assumption that Cole requires frequent changes to remain where he is - which just isn't true. His pitch distribution changed a lot when he first got to Houston but has remained constant since. His release point has remained constant as well. It's not as if he is making constant changes game to game, or even year to year in houston. He'll go where the most money as every free agent does.

I noticed my link did not work on my phone, so I re-uploaded it to imgur:

They could address pretty much every area of concern with a good player and be at 110 so i wouldn't be mad at that. Wheeler, Smith, RF, JD Martinez would get you to about 110.

Not this again... ha, I don't think there are going to be many leaks nor do I think the team is going to build expectations (even internally) as they did last off season. If they learned one lesson, it's to strike in silence and fail in silence.

I just want to say, I wouldn't touch Keuchel with a 10 foot pole personally. He has been trending down every single year since 2015, culminating into this year where he's been dreadful when you ignore his ERA. After his peak in 2015, he flat lined in 2016, 2017 and 2018 remaining constantly average but this year he took a hell of a nose dive down to well below average. If you believe it was due to him sitting out, fine, but then you're just hoping he returns to his middling level of 2016-2018. Any regression from that makes him Ivan Nova bad.

Strasburg would be fine, but I do want to emphasize that his regression has already started. He peaked in 2017 and has been below that level in 2018 and 2019 despite being healthier than usual. It's not dramatic, and if he ages gracefully he should still be good the next 3-4 years, but at 1500 innings already he's really close (500-700 innings) away from a point that most arms (90%+ of this group) fell off a cliff. From 2013-2017 he saw a rise in production every single year, in 2018 he regressed and 2019 he bounced back a little. I don't think he'll ever return to his 2017 outputs though based on the trends showing now. He's learned how to pitch with lesser stuff so he may stabilize where his is now until his stuff deteriorates further and we will see another year that will require adjustments to succeed.

Kluber is actually really similar to Bumgarner (if we ignore age and just focus on IP). Kluber's peak was better (see the WAR/IP on the right as the scale is different) but there 6 year window of similarity is incredibly similar. Kluber is older so time will tell if he bounces back like Bumgarner did this year - I wouldn't expect him ever to return to form based on the fact that no one has followed his trajectory and then peaked up again (unless you count Verlander and I don't). I have attached Kluber and Bumgarner to compare. I also added Cole just to show how amazing Cole is. He's at 1200 innings pitched with no regression registering yet. I'm not sure if that means it's right around the corner for Cole, or if he's going to blow through the regression line and become this generations pitching outlier. It's hard not to understand the hesitance that FO's have when signing pitchers to big long FA contracts. Greinke is an interesting one as he has clearly evolved as he aged - his aging curve looks more similar to soft tossers (alternating peaks and valleys) after his initial regression which was dramatic when his stuff took a downward trajectory.

Yes, agree 100%. I think there's risk tied to Wheeler because of the surgeries, but the best part about the surgeries is it's limited his arm mileage. Odorizzi seems to be a classic case of a veteran pitcher figuring out some form of contact suppression paired with a slight spike in velocity, but based on others that shared his similarity scores, there's a higher chance of escalated regression during the tenure of his next contract than Bumgarner and Wheeler. I think the Anibal Sanchez comp was actually an excellent one for Odorizzi. Wheeler isn't really a candidate to fall off a cliff - non-injury related - which I found really promising when it comes to signing him. I'm tying a bunch of other parameters into these drill downs - such as FIP, BABIP, LOB%, and HR/FB% and wRC+ against, FB% and GB% - to match up the similarities even further. I just can't get over what a machine Scherzer is. Talk about an outlier. Verlander is the closest and he's not all that close due to his mid-career downswing.

No worries, the best part about this is that from over my shoulder, it looks like I'm doing my job. ? Slow few days at work before the storm hits me on Thursday/Friday.

I'm not drawing any conclusions based on just this, as there are hundreds of variables that I need to look at further, but if you wan to do similarity scores on these pitchers you see the following comparisons: 1. Bumgarner - Closest similarity score is CC Sabathia; who had a similar spike early and mid, only to fall off a cliff for 350 innings and then rebound to a level that was about 70% of his previous highs. CC's return to being slightly above average lasted for roughly 490 innings. He never regained form following his initial decline. 2. Odorizzi - If you remove the injury year, Odorizzi's closest comp of regression is Anibal Sanchez. Sanchez was average and then had a five peak year run where his WAR/IP stayed above .02 WAR/IP. Odorizzi would be in year 2 of his spike - it doesn't mean he has three years left of productivity it just means that's the closest equal. 3. Wheeler - Well, this one is kind of tricky. Wheeler could head in one of two likely directions as he has to comps through his IP total and one of those comps is an OOOOO la la. One comp through his IP total is Max Scherzer ironically enough. Wheeler is in year 2 of his growth post surgery, and he has seen a steady increase in WAR/IP year over year at the same rate as Scherzer. Obviously, Scherzer is the biggest outlier of our data set and continued to grow. Wheeler is certainly not guaranteed to do that but man it sure is nice to dream. His other is Johnny Cueto, who is still a nice comp in regards to age regression. In general, I'd say I feel most comfortable with Wheeler of the three. There's risk there, but you can dream on Wheeler like you can't on the other two IMO. Wheeler is trending up for all the right reasons; while Odorizzi has some artificial WAR escalators.

This data is exported from fangraphs; I have a breference export and others as well, but only tied FGraphs into this set. Here is a graphic of all the pitchers we discussed. The trends are as follows: 37 of the 49 pitchers experience a steady decline following their peak (which on average took place after 987 innings pitched). There were some exceptions: 1. Scherzer is like fine wine - look at that man's chart! He just keeps getting better and better. 2. AJ Burnett had no real peak - his career was a culmination of 3-4 peaks and valleys not tied to age but possibly injury 3. Buehrle had an earlyish peak, but he remained pretty constant over his career. 4. Cliff Lee struggled mightily early (as most knew) and then steadily increased after 1000 IP. 5. Bumgarner has shown a similar constant to those in the 37 of 49 group; he peaked at about 950 innings, and has been on a decline before this years small spike upward. The question with Bumgarner is will he normalize at his new level, or will his outputs look really similar to the rest o pitchers who continued to trend downward despite a spike in an individual year here and there at the end of their career. I'm going to put Odorizzi, Wheeler and Bumgarner side by side to look at and I'll build a quick projection based on the expected decrease post 987 innings to see where there WAR could sit the next 4-5 years. https://ibb.co/C9PtJz7 You'll have to click on the link to the picture above because it is too large to attach to this file.

I'll see if I can work age in. I'll attach all 43 breakdowns once I finish with something for actual work. I have Bumgarner's and can export coles/wheeler/odorizzi as well to see where they fall. From an analysis I did prior, IP had a higher correlation of decline than age - which makes sense. Mileage would have more of an impact. I didnt export player age with this data export - I have ages on my computer at home but forgot to transfer that table over to pair it to the player ids.

And I broke them all down individually as well: Here are the first 8. I think you can see the trend here. Scherzer and Verlander are not the norm.

As we can see from the attached, there is a significant downward trend as the innings go up - we notice a spike last year, but that is because certain pitchers qualified for the threshold for the first time last year. Despite the WAR totals increasing as more pitchers become eligible based on the 1800 inning limit, we see an overall decrease in WAR/IP.

Some observations off the bat: I set the threshold at 1800 innings since 2000 as the barometer of a work horse like arm. 1. Pitchers that exceeded the 1800 inning limit had a significantly higher WAR/IP than pitchers who did not. Pitchers > 1800 IP = .016 WAR/IP. Pitchers < 1800 IP = .010 2. I don't have age data exported - simply IP data. I haven't exported all the players BDay's so I can only analyze a pitchers fall off based on age; I can only do it based on work load which I believe has a greater impact on arm failure than age. 3. Mark Buehrle is the 9th most productive pitcher in all of baseball since 2000. Beast. 4. Clayton Kershaw and Randy Johnson are light years better than the competition - coming in at .028 WAR/IP while the next closest is .026 which is Max Scherzer.

OK @bmags I transferred all my data sets over to my work computer and I'm running an analysis now. Here are the top 46 pitchers since 2000 in regards to IP - this puts the threshold right around 2000 innings pitched. I will break this down further to year by year to see what their WAR expectations were based on every 200 IP interval as their career progressed. If you have anything else you'd like me to look at further, let me know.

Understand that concern. I also think my contract to odorizzi was too generous. If the QO is attached to him, I think he probably gets closer to 50 million.

The corner outfield market is dead in baseball for mid-tier guys.